The story of the Women's Air Service Pilots (WASP) in the United States is relatively
well known.
Much less well known however is the story of the Night Witches, an
incredible group of Soviet women who flew bombing missions during World War II.

The year was 1941 and Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. By November the
German army was just 19 miles from Moscow. Leningrad was under siege and 3
million Russians had been taken prisoner. The Soviet air force was grounded.

In the summer of 1941 Marina Raskova, a
record-breaking aviatrix, was called upon
to organize a regiment of women pilots to fly night combat missions of
harassment bombing.
From mechanics to navigators, pilots and officers, the 588th regiment
was composed entirely of women.
The 588th was so successful and deadly that the Germans came to fear
them, calling them Nachthexen--night witches.

The women, most of them barely 20 years old, started training in Engels,
a small town north of Stalingrad. The women of the 588th
flew their first bombing mission
on June 8, 1942. It consisted of three planes; their target was the headquarters
of a German division. The raid was successful but one plane was lost.

The 588th flew thousands of combat bombing missions.
They fought non-stop for months, sometimes flying 15 to 18 missions
on the same night. They flew obsolete Polikarpov Po-2 wooden biplanes that were
otherwise used as trainers. They could only carry two bombs that weighed less
than a ton altogether. Most of the women who survived the war had, by the end,
flown almost a thousand missions each.

Nadya Popova recalls those missions and comments that it was a miracle the Witches
didn't suffer more losses. Their planes were the slowest ones in the air force
and often came back riddled with bullets, but they kept flying. In
August of 1942 Nadya and her navigator crashed in the Caucasus. They were
found alive a few days later.

Years after the war, Nadya commented that she used to sometimes look up
into the dark night sky, remembering when she was a young girl crouched at the controls
of her bomber, and she would say to herself, "Nadya, how did you do it?"

There was a great deal of resistance to the idea of women combat pilots
from their male counterparts. The women had to fight both enemy aircraft as
well as the resentment of their male colleagues. In spite of the
never-ending fatigue , the loss of friends, and sexual harassment from their
suspicious male counterparts, the women kept on flying. Eventually the
Soviets formed three regiments of women combat pilots -- the 586th, the
587th and the 588th.

The 586th also trained at Engels, first in the two-seat Yak-7 trainers
and later on in the Yak-1 fighters. The women proved themselves to be as
good as the men. The most outstanding pilots were Raisa Belyaeva and
Valeria Khomyakova. The later was allowed to fly solo in the Yak-1 after
just 52 minutes of dual instruction. She earned the grade of "excellent"
during one trial flight but on a subsequent flight crash-landed on the
frozen Volga River when she switched to an empty fuel tank. All of the
women had their hands full, learning so much information in such a short
amount of time.

The female mechanics also had their hands full
with the demanding task of keeping the planes flying. The winter of 1942 was
brutally cold, with temperatures plunging as low as
-54F and countless snow storms. One night in March of that year the women were called upon
to save the aircraft from being blown over by gale-force winds. Several women
would literally lie on the wings and horizontal stabilizers of each plane, using
the weight of their bodies
to keep the planes from blowing away. When the wind subsided, the women looked
like snowmen, but the planes were intact. Their respite was brief however. By
noon the storm had resumed, and again the women rushed to the airfield to
save the planes. The storm finally blew itself out around midnight, and the
exhausted women, soaked to the skin and half frozen, could finally rest.

Tactics used by the Night Witches

The Night Witches practiced what is known as harassment bombing. Their
targets were encampments, supply depots, rear base areas, etc. Their constant
raids made rest for the troops difficult and left them feeling very insecure.

The top speed of the Po-2 biplane was 94 mph ((82 knots). This is slower than
even most World War I fighters and left them very vulnerable to enemy night
fighters. But the Night Witches learned their craft well. The Po-2 was
very slow, but it was also extremely maneuverable. When a German Me-109 tried to
intercept it, the Night Witches would throw their Po-2 biplanes into a tight
turn at an airspeed that was below the stalling speed of the Me-109. This
forced the German pilot to make a wider circle and come back for another try,
only to be met by the same tactic, time after time. Many of the Witches
flew so low to the ground that they were hidden by hedgerows! Completely frustrated,
the German pilots would finally simply give up and leave the Po-2 biplanes
alone. German pilots were promised an Iron Cross for shooting down a Po-2!

The stall speed of an Me-109 E,F and G models was about 120 mph ((104 knots).
This made the top speed of the Po-2 biplanes slower than the stalling speed
of the German fighters. The Focke-Wulf, also used in the Eastern front, had a
high stalling speed as well, so it suffered the same fate.

The Witches developed the technique of flying close to their intended
targets, then cutting their engines. Silently they would glide to their
targets and release their bombs. Then they would restart their engines and
fly away. The first warning the Germans had of an impending raid was the
sound of the wind whistling against the wing bracing wires of the Po-2s,
and by then it was too late.

The Po-2 would often pass undetected by the radar of the German fighters
due to the unreflective nature of the canvas surfaces and also because they
flew so low to the ground. Planes equipped with infrared heat seekers fared
no better at detecting them due to the small heat emission
from their puny little 110-hp engines.

Searchlights, however presented a big problem. The Germans at Stalingrad developed
what the Russians called a "flak circus". They would arrange flak guns and
searchlights (hidden during the day) in concentric circles around probable
targets. Planes flying in pairs in a straight-line flight path across the
perimeter were often ripped to shreds by the flak guns. So the Night Witches of the
588th developed their own technique to deal with the problem. They flew in
groups of three. Two would go in and deliberately attract the attention of the Germans.
When all the searchlights were pointed at them, the two pilots would
suddenly separate, flying in opposite directions and maneuvering wildly
to shake off the searchlight operators who were trying to follow them.
In the meantime the third pilot would fly in through
the dark path cleared by her two teammates and hit the target virtually
unopposed. She would then get out, rejoin the other two, and they would
switch places until all three had delivered their payloads. As Nadya Popova
noted, it took nerves of steel to be a decoy and willingly attract enemy
fire, but it worked very well.

Marina Raskova - record-breaking Soviet aviatrix

In 1938 Marina Raskova and two other women set a world record for non-stop
direct flight by women when they flew an ANT-37,
a Soviet-built twin-engine aircraft
named Rodina (homeland), 6,000 kilometers (3,240 nautical miles) from Moscow
to Komsomolsk-on-Amur on the southeastern tip of Siberia.

The aircraft started icing up over Siberia, and the women struggled to
gain altitude. They threw everything they could move out of the airplane,
but still they continued to lose altitude. Realizing they were out of
options and a crash was inevitable unless they could further
lighten the plane, Marina, who was the navigator on the flight,
decided upon a daring course of action. Noting their position on a map
she bailed out into the frigid darkness of Siberia. The two remaining
women eventually landed safely at their destination, and a hunter
rescued Marina.

Marina and the other two women were the first women to be awarded the
Hero of the Soviet Union medal for their record-breaking flight. It was
Marina's accomplishments and visibility that helped her persuade Stalin
to form the three regiments of women combat pilots.